Secondary Sources: Long-Term Unemployment, Corporate Taxes, Bribery

–Long-Term Unemployment: The Pew Charitable Trusts released a report on long-term unemployment. “Long-term unemployment is occurring among people of all ages. But the data show that once they lose their jobs, older workers are the most likely to remain out of work for a year or longer. In the third quarter of 2011, more than 43 percent of unemployed workers older than 55 had been out of work for at least a year. Although individuals with higher levels of education are less likely to lose their jobs in the ﬁrst place, once they are unemployed, long-term joblessness is distributed across all education levels, similar to the third quarter of last year.”

–Corporate Taxes:Howard Gleckman says cutting the corporate tax by 10 percentage points is a near impossibility. “The non-partisan [Joint Committee on Taxation] found that even if Congress scrubbed every single corporate preference from the code (a political fantasy if ever there was one) it could not get the corporate rate below 28 percent without adding to the budget deficit, raising taxes on individuals, or cutting spending.The JCT study, which was requested and released by House Ways & Means Committee Democrats, comes just days after the panel’s chairman, Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), proposed a 25 percent rate as part of a major corporate reform. Camp did not say how he’d pay for his proposed changes.”

–Bribery: The Economist charts international bribery. “Bribery involves two parties, not one. Lambasting officials in poor countries for their sticky fingers is easier (and less open to legal challenge) than investigating the outsiders who suborn them. On November 2nd Transparency International (TI), a Berlin-based campaigning group, published its Bribe Payers Index. Based on questions to 3,000 businessmen, this ranks 28 countries (accounting for 80% of global trade and investment) by the perceived likelihood of their companies paying bribes when doing business abroad. Construction and industries involving government contracts, unsurprisingly, were the dirtiest. This index shows a different side of bribery from TI’s Corruption Perceptions Index, which focuses on corruption in the public sector. Putting them together, there is a strong correlation between corruption in the public and private sectors.”